Nothing But The Rain
by SiriuslyPeeved
Summary: Slight AU: One year after the series finale, Lee Adama weighs solitude and Kara Thrace's memory in the springtime on new Earth. Contains spoilers for the entire series. Lee/Kara


**Disclaimer:** While Ron Moore may have scarred me for life with the ending of this television series, it's not mine. Certain lines are quoted directly from episodes of _Battlestar Galactica_.

**Author's Note:** For those who have not yet watched the show, this story is set about a year after the series finale, "Daybreak." It's loaded with spoilers for the entire show.

Dedicated to all my good friends at the RLt and to the Spirit of Sweet Springtime, which dragged this story from canon to AU. I couldn't help myself! This is slightly altered from the version posted in our spring collaboration, 2012, and may well be continued at some future point. (though presently I'm buried neck deep in my Harry Potter AU sequel and Star Wars parallel original trilogy!)

This chapter was beta-read by the wonderful darkin520! Thank you!

**Nothing But The Rain**

Lee Adama lay down on his stomach in the damp fallen leaves and adjusted the sights on his Colonial-issue binoculars. A pair of sleek, brown ducks swam across the surface of the pond, parting the circular impressions left behind by falling raindrops.

Lee wondered, as always, at the presence of such familiar things as ducks on the new Earth, halfway across the galaxy from the Twelve Colonies; they were nearly identical to the birds swimming in the lakes around Caprica City when he was a boy.

_Bill Adama surveyed the rude fireplace of charred stone with as much satisfaction as he would someday view the gleaming consoles of the _Galactica._ His sons were his crew and the whole planet__,__ his vessel._

_Twelve-year-old Lee sat on a flat rock chewing on a sour piece of fruit. The old man was such a delusional bastard. The family was broken beyond repair; two weekends in the woods each summer, getting chewed to death by bugs and pissing behind trees, couldn't possibly fix anything. Dad never showed up for school vacations or holidays, and then__,__ their summers were full of pretending nothing was wrong. Mom wasn't any help, she just wanted to shove the boys at their father and slam the door behind them._

_Lee's ten-year-old brother hauled back on his fishing rod and pulled a silver-sided trout from the cold stream. _

"_Good one, Zac!"_

_Dad's proud look brought a resentful hunch to Lee's shoulders. Lee usually spent the entire weekend wishing for a seat in Grandpa's air-conditioned library with a big stack of legal journals and a cold glass of lemonade._

_Dad helped Zac put his fish on the string in the stream and then started taking pictures of birds again. Lee wondered what people in the Fleet would say if word got around about where the great Commander Adama spent so much of his free time__,__ halfway hanging out of a tree, taking pictures of songbirds. Afterward, he forced both sons to sit still and look at blurry slideshows, every last picture._

_Lee knew he was a disappointment, much like the constant succession of photographs that almost – but not quite – captured the split-second postures of the birds._

_Over and over again, Bill Adama took his sons back to the wild, trying to capture what he thought was really there._

It wasn't until Zac was dead and humanity fled the Twelve Colonies that Lee really became close to his father. Kara was his Dad's pet and prodigy and he loved her like a daughter; sometimes, Lee and Kara were like siblings battling for the Commander's approval and attention. Lee smiled at the memory.

From far away in the bare treetops came a broken chattering sound, a swell of wings and strident calls. A mixed flock of small, dark birds landed haphazardly in the trees overhead. Perhaps the birds were returning to the forest for the season or merely flowing north in an inexorable migration, drawn by music only they could hear… just like Kara.

What was Kara Thrace when she climbed down from the unmarked _Viper_ six months after she died? Was she an angel? A ghost? What was she when her arms closed tightly around him, her pale hair falling around his face?

_All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again._

Lee didn't live in the world of destiny, and he didn't think much of the Cylon God. Ever since the war began, he'd tried his best to avoid thinking about the mysteries running beneath the everyday world.

After he left the military, Lee buried himself in the intricacies of law. He was fascinated by how humans found new ways to cheat or reward one another: how they found the power to repress or the strength to lift someone up. Daily needs trumped the pull of the unknown until the _Viper's_ pristine hatch popped with a sigh of newness, of never having opened before, and Kara Thrace emerged, reborn.

Lee watched her die. He _knew_ she had died; no one had ejected from the doomed _Viper _as it plummeted toward the gas giant. And yet, there she was on the flight deck, saying she had been to Earth and would take them there.

A small black bird hopped down from the conifer branch over Lee's head and pecked curiously at the remnants of his dinner. The bird's jerky movements, almost reptilian, fascinated Lee as he lay in the damp brush. He tried to take a picture, but it was blurry, even close up. Lee's quick smile was rueful – how Dad would laugh if he ever found out that Lee was finally taking pictures of birds.

"_Dad, this is a waste of time," Lee had complained as a young pilot._

_Bill Adama turned toward him with a twist of his deeply lined face. "Who can fly without having to strap himself into a machine? Not you. Salute the bird, Cadet; he is your superior."_

Lee's_ Raptor_ waited quietly in the brush behind him. He had enough fuel for one or two more long flights – Saul and Ellen Tigh lived several hundred kilometers up the coast, and he'd wanted to roam over the mountains behind their camp – but after that, he'd have to scrap her. The faithful_ Raptor_ was no bird in truth, but only a machine.

Lee was alone on a wide continent strewn sparsely with Cylon and human survivors; some of the planet's indigenous human population lived nearby, but he might never see another familiar face if he let the _Raptor _run out of fuel. In a way, that would be what he deserved.

Before the war, he was going to marry a girl named Gianne. When she told him she was pregnant, he bolted. _"One last mission,"_ he told her, _"__Just for Dad's decommissioning, and I'll be home soon."_

Two weeks later came the Cylon invasion. Perhaps Lee and Gianne would have gotten off-planet if he had only stayed, perhaps he would be sitting here in the woods of new Earth with Gianne and the child; perhaps they all would have been blown to bits, but at least they would have been together.

Sometimes, it was hard to remember Gianne's voice, the feeling of her body in his arms, the way she picked up his socks on the bathroom floor, the way she laughed at even his dumbest jokes. Lee probed at his guilt and pain like a deep bruise, the kind you can't feel unless you push down on it with your thumbs; but then, when you reach the wound under the skin, it hurts just like the day it was new.

And then there was his ex-wife, Dee, who folded into herself from grief and despair when she beheld the ruin of the old Earth: the spark of her kind spirit extinguished by hopelessness.

Lee didn't know whether he could have prevented Dee's suicide, but he knew he had failed his wife by loving Kara Thrace, failed her by never being able to let his love transform back into friendship. Lee's marriage and Kara's, for that matter, meant so little in the end.

Lee smiled in the cold twilight. Thinking of Kara made him feel warmer. The rain fell harder, and he settled under a tarp in the hollow between the newly sprung ferns. He plucked one of the tightly curled ferns from the ground and washed it with pond water run through the sterilizer. It tasted of springtime, of tromping through the woods behind Zac and his father, of swatting mosquitoes while listening to Zac suck up to Dad for the five-millionth time.

Lee wondered if he'd ever see his father again. Alone in the forest, five hundred kilometers from any human being, he could finally admit that he wished he had let himself enjoy those long-ago camping trips in the forests around Caprica City. Zac was dead, and Dad lived alone with Laura Roslin's memory. Lee had loved Laura, too; she was good for Dad, and she was a friend and mentor.

_Time moves more quickly than we'd like_, thought Lee._ Even if our loved ones aren't following a destiny larger than themselves, even if they are just ordinary, weak people - gentle ones, like Dee, or brash and loyal and funny__,__ like Zac - death takes them anyway, just because it must. Just because we are no different in her eyes from this fern I've chewed and swallowed or the little moths flying around my flashlight__._

A rustle in the bracken behind the _Raptor _made Lee grab for his gun. "Show yourself!"

_There aren't any people within a hundred kilometers, you moron; it's probably a deer._

Branches snapped just behind the_ Raptor's_ starboard wing. Lee moved closer, keeping his weapon at the ready. Some of the local predators could be dangerous when protecting their young; in springtime, the mothers were most easily annoyed.

A tall woman in Colonial fatigues stepped out from behind the _Raptor_. Her pale golden hair hung past her shoulders, and her smile held everything Lee had ever wished for. Her open palm trailed slowly across the wing as she walked toward him.

_"What do you hear?"_

Lee holstered his weapon and stepped toward her. He didn't care whether she was a ghost or an angel or a hallucination born of months alone in the forest. He closed the distance between them; his boots sank into the damp, dead grass, and thorns caught at his pant legs.

"_No__thing but the rain,"_ said Lee, raising a wondering hand to her face and brushing at a smudge of dirt on her cheekbone.

Kara stepped closer to him and dropped her pack on the mossy ground. Warm and solid and real, she placed a hand on either side of his waist and leaned into his touch. Her voice came back muffled when she answered, _"Then grab your gun and bring in the cat."_


End file.
